1. Statement of the Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate to packet routers. More particularly, the invention concerns systems and methods for routing packets in communication equipment with a relatively high degree of assurance.
2. Description of the Related Art
Tactical radios are known in the art. Such tactical radios include, but are not limited to, a multi-channel tactical radio that runs modern networking and legacy waveforms. The multi-channel tactical radio includes up to three radio modules. The networking traffic interface to the three radio modules is an Ethernet interface. As such, a rear panel of the multi-channel tactical radio contains three external plaintext Ethernet ports supporting up to three external networks. Each external network handles data of a respective classification level of a plurality of classification levels (e.g., secret, confidential, and unclassified). The Ethernet ports can be configured for cross banding (i.e., cross from one network to another such that data from one network can be communicated over another different network), and therefore may cross from one data classification level to another classification level. In a retransmit mode, plaintext data from one radio module may need to be sent to multiple destinations. Therefore, there is a need for a high assurance, highly configurable, one to one, and one to many packet router capable of meeting Multiple Single Levels of Security (“MSLS”) requirements.
In the past, various solutions for providing such a packet router have been derived. Once such solution involves including multiple levels of security within the multi-channel tactical radio. This meant physically independent and separate hardware for handling data of each classification level and/or network. In such scenarios, there was a need for control, status, alarms or key data to be collected into or distributed from a single source. This has been accomplished with cryptographic methods to ensure data is delivered to the correct channel and that no channel data “leaked across” the separation. Consequently, information from different classification levels or channels is processed by separate and distinct hardware components of the multi-channel tactical radio. Such an arrangement is computationally intensive, hardware intensive, and costly, as well as provides a multi-channel tactical radio with a relatively large overall size.